Examining every mount point on the system has a downside too. In
general, find will be used to search just part of the
filesystem. However, find examines every mount point. If the
system has a filesystem mounted on an unresponsive NFS server,
find will hang, waiting for the NFS server to respond. Worse,
it does this even if the affected mount point is not within the
directory tree that find would have searched anyway.
This is very unfortunate. However, this problem only affects systems
that have no support for O_FOLLOW. As far as I can tell, it is not
possible on such systems to fix all three problems (the race
condition, the false-alarm at automount mount points, and the hang at
startup if there is a dead NFS server) at once. If you have some
ideas about how find could do this better, please send email to
the bug-findutils@gnu.org mailing list.